Baby's On The Way!: Bound by a Baby Bump / Expecting the Prince's Baby / The Pregnant Witness. Rebecca Winters

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СКАЧАТЬ sigh of relief, a smile and darting glances at the stairs. ‘Grab whatever you need,’ he said, suddenly feeling distant and uncomfortable around her, with her need for control—and his fear of it—sitting between them like a threat. ‘I’ll make some more coffee.’

      She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Do you have any decaf?’

      ‘Sorry, I didn’t think.’

      He leaned back against the kitchen counter as she went upstairs. Decaf? Another pregnancy thing, he assumed. Just one more part of this whole situation he was completely clueless about. Every good feeling he’d had when they’d shared breakfast had abandoned him, and even the house seemed darker and colder this side of the meal. Rachel re-emerged from the stairs a few moments later, clutching her bound-up papers, a notebook and her tablet.

      ‘Old-fashioned or new-fangled?’ she asked as she sat neatly at the table and set everything out in front of her. Death by fire or water? What did it matter?

      But the smile had returned to her lips, her arms hung loosely at her sides, and she had lost the drawn, haunted look that told of a frightened woman.

      ‘You choose.’ He tried to keep the weighty, quavery feeling fluttering in his belly out of his voice. ‘You’re the expert here.’ He hoped it didn’t sound snarky. He didn’t mean it to. Didn’t mean to blame her for how uncomfortable he was. It didn’t make sense to be angry at her for the situation they found themselves in. It wasn’t her fault they were pregnant. It wasn’t her fault that the way she wanted to live her life was the opposite of his. They just had to find a way to make this work for both of them. All of them.

      ‘Old-fashioned, then.’ She opened the notebook out to a blank double spread and reached for her pen. He could tell she was itching to write her headings across the top of the page but seemed to be waiting for his okay to do so. ‘So...where do you want to start?’

      He took a deep breath. She’d obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this. And to be honest her plan was probably as good as anything that they could come up with together. As he’d said—she was the expert here. But if he didn’t have his say now, then when would he? Would he find himself in ten years’ time on a path that she had chosen, and that he had never had any idea of where it was going? If he didn’t rein this in, if she couldn’t learn to live a little less rigidly, he’d find himself stifled and trapped. And if she couldn’t start compromising now, then he couldn’t see how this was ever going to work.

      ‘Perhaps we could start with the next few weeks,’ he said eventually, thinking that even he could manage with planning that far out, if he had to. ‘And anything that needs a specific date. Appointments, travel plans, that sort of thing.’

      Rachel nodded and he could tell from the small smile on her face she already knew exactly how she expected the next few weeks to pan out. She probably had appointments lined up, time blocked out, and knew exactly where he should be and at what time. But she said none of this and instead waited for him to make a suggestion. At least she seemed willing to try as hard as he was to make this work.

      ‘Do you have any doctor’s appointments scheduled? I’m not really sure how this works but I’d like to be there if that’s what you want.’

      ‘I’ve an appointment with my GP in a few days. Probably won’t be much to tell at that stage, from what I’ve read. But generally they want to schedule the first scan at some point around twelve weeks.’

      ‘Twelve weeks?’ He raised a brow in question.

      ‘The twelfth week of the pregnancy. Not twelve weeks from now. Or, in fact, twelve weeks from when we...’ He smiled a little at her embarrassment. ‘The counting is weird,’ she continued, a light blush colouring her cheeks. ‘Right now I think I’m about nine weeks pregnant, even though it’s not that long since we... They count from the first day of your last...’

      ‘Are you going to finish a sentence today?’ He laughed at the sudden appearance of this bashfulness. ‘Or is there always going to be so much guesswork?’

      ‘I’m sorry. It seems stupid to be embarrassed talking about any of this when you’re the one, well, we’re the ones... Sorry.’

      She laughed, too, and Leo relaxed into his chair as the tension in the air palpably lightened. What was it about her laugh that reached his spine and his heart?

      ‘I’m doing it again, aren’t I?’ He nodded. ‘They count from the first day of your last period, which means today is week nine of the pregnancy even though it’s not been that long since we...met. Which means they’ll want to schedule the scan for around three weeks’ time.’

      ‘I’d like to be there.’

      ‘Me, too.’ They both smiled, and he breathed a sigh of relief, glad that they’d found this common ground at last. Maybe they could do this. Maybe they could find a compromise to make them both happy. And if they did that, what next? What more could there be between them when they weren’t both terrified of what the other craved?

      Rachel drew a column on the piece of paper and wrote the heading Appointments at the top; then clicked through the screen of her phone with one hand and wrote the date in the column with the other. She glanced up at him. ‘Do you want to make a note of the date?’

      Or maybe they couldn’t. ‘What date? You haven’t got an appointment yet.’

      ‘No, but I’m sure they’ll make it that week. You could...’

      ‘Rachel, this is one of those times when you’re going to have to let me make a decision for myself. I’m perfectly capable of keeping in my head the fact that I will have to make some time approximately three weeks from now to attend the scan. It’s not something I’m likely to forget. Just because I’m not doing it your way doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong.’

      She concentrated hard on the page; going over and over one word with her pen until he feared the paper would dissolve. But she didn’t argue with him. The best he could hope for, for now, he supposed.

      ‘Okay, so that’s the appointments sorted for now. What next?’

      ‘I want to have the baby in London.’

      ‘Makes sense, considering you live there.’

      ‘So you’ll have to make arrangements to be up there, if you want to be around when it happens.’ He nodded, able to see the logic in that. He waited, wondering whether she’d want him to make some more definite plans, but she seemed happy—or at least reluctantly willing—to leave it at that for now. Though he did notice the way her pen ripped through the paper slightly as she wrote the next word.

      ‘Fine.’

      ‘Seems to me like we can’t really decide anything to do with dates until you’ve seen a doctor, though,’ Leo said. ‘So how about we leave that for now and move on to another part of the plan? What else is on your list that needs deciding now?’

      When she didn’t reply, he looked up from where his eyes had been following her pen scoring into the paper, to find her sitting with her mouth open and a hesitant look on her face. ‘What?’

      ‘You’re right. We don’t need to decide everything now.’ She started to close the notebook, but Leo reached out and laid a hand across the page, trying not to notice the way that his СКАЧАТЬ